Ok ok, before I start ranting about misadventures in Charlie’s kitchen I just want to take 20 seconds out to thank Nicole of Gluten Free on a Shoestring for even providing this damned recipe. It may have frustrated the hell out of me, but the results were edible and I can (and will) try it again with some changes.

Ok, firstly don’t even look at this recipe unless you have time to kill. Lots of it. This is a long, multistep, chill and work, chill and work, recipe. Hours of your fucking time. So yeah, that’s one thing. Sick girls who just want to sleep should not be trying this shit.

Second thing, Nicole uses a particular gluten free flour that she likes… which bears exactly zero resemblance to my homemade gf flour mix because gluten free flour is a bitch like that. Following the recipe as it was gave me a very soft, wet, dough. I persevered, having no idea what I was doing anyway so what the fuck lets just keep working with it and see what happens…

Round 1: Nutella!

Several frustrating, irritating, hours later I tossed the knife and rolling pin in the sink. I bundled the dough up into two balls – one for custard and the other for nutella – threw the former into the fridge wrapped in cling film and the later broke up into even-ish chunks and smoothed them into rounds with my fingers. A table spoon of nutella, wrap these soft hunks of dough up into balls and threw them on a pan. I didn’t wait for them to rise after they didn’t budge in the first half our and damned near burnt them cooking them…

That said. They were pretty damned good nutella pastries, if a bit flat and doughy.

Next round will involve changing up the dough big time. I’m debating between my bread base with almond flour and a small amount of polenta (I can’t find proper maize here) and my general GF mix with almond flour to get a more resiliant dough. Milk will be added slowly to manage the dough’s texture in much the same way as I’d make bread dough.

I’m gonna do the custard ones tomorrow. Hopefully a night in the fridge will help the dough out a bit.

Maybe.

Round 2: Actual real life custard buns

[UPDATE: The second half of the dough lived in the fridge for 2 days and I finally got around to using it today with the custard filling. Again no rise, but they look better. They’re wayyyyy too hot right now to eat so I’ll report back.

UPDATE 2: OMNOMNOM!!! These turned out much better. I had added more flour to the dough to dry it up a bit and it worked much better.]